The collaborative authoring of documents has become almost ubiquitous in the modern work place. However, when more than one person has input into the document generation process, difficulties can arise. A typical scenario might be as follows: A company employee completes a draft of a presentation, and emails it to a few co-workers for comments. The co-workers email their suggestions back to the original author, but also send the presentation on to others for additional input. In a relatively short period of time, a significant number of different versions of the presentation can end up being stored on the hard disk drives of computers throughout the company. Only one of these versions, however, is the authoritative one.
This result is only one of the many difficulties that can be encountered when the control over documentation is available to a variety of different people within an organization. Other examples of these difficulties include the possibility that an employee may invest a significant amount of time editing an important proposal, without the knowledge that he or she may not be working on the latest version of that proposal. In another case, a departing employee may return a laptop containing a large number of important documents and information, but it would be impractical to search through hundreds or thousands of files, many of which may be irrelevant, to find a few valuable items of information. As another example, a team of employees may need to take turns adding content to a new presentation, but if any one or more of them is unable to respond in a timely manner, bottlenecks will occur that can significantly extend the process.
In the past, these types of problems have been addressed to a limited extent by instituting a centralized system for document management. Generally, a central repository is established for important documents, such as a shared network drive, a web-based team room, or a formal document management system. This type of approach works well in settings where the work is structured, takes place primarily within company facilities, and does not involve people outside of the organization. Server-centric solutions of this type have been widely accepted in highly regulated areas, where meticulous record keeping is mandatory, such as in the pharmaceutical and legal professions.
Outside of these controlled settings, employees tend to work in less formal, unregulated ways. In a typical corporate setting, document authors may do their most pressing work outside of the mainstream of the corporate infrastructure. Typically, they may use their own hard disk drives to store important documents, and rely upon familiar tools, such as email, to share documents and route requests for edits and approvals. These informal approaches tend to be widely adopted because they conform to a user's typical work habits, and therefore do not present an inconvenience. However, they can result in inefficiency in the overall context of document management, resulting in the kinds of problems discussed previously.
The general objective of the present invention is to provide a user-focused approach to document management that accommodates the agile, mobile work habits of the modern environment, in a manner that complements and enhances the value of centralized storage and document management systems.